An article from Do or Die Issue 8. In the
paper edition, this article appears on page(s)
63-78.

Pirate Utopias

Under the Banner of King Death

from Our Own Correspondent

"In an honest Service, there is thin Commons, low Wages, and hard Labour;
in this, Plenty and Satiety, Pleasure and Ease, Liberty and Power; and who would
not ballance Creditor on this Side, when all the Hazard that is run for it, at
worst, is only a sower Look or two at choaking. No, a merry Life and a short one
shall be my Motto" - Pirate Captain Bartholomew Roberts.(1)

During the 'Golden Age' of piracy in the 17th and 18th centuries, crews of
early proletarian rebels, dropouts from civilization, plundered the lucrative
shipping lanes between Europe and America. They operated from land enclaves,
free ports; 'pirate utopias' located on islands and coastlines as yet beyond the
reach of civilization. From these mini-anarchies - 'temporary autonomous zones'
- they launched raiding parties so successful that they created an imperial
crisis, attacking British trade with the colonies, and crippling the emerging
system of global exploitation, slavery and colonialism.(2)

We can easily imagine the attraction of life as a sea-rover, answerable to
no-one. Euro-American society of the 17th and 18th centuries was one of emergent
capitalism, war, slavery, land enclosures and clearances; starvation and poverty
side-by-side with unimaginable wealth. The Church dominated all aspects of life
and women had few options beyond marital slavery. You could be press-ganged into
the navy and endure conditions far worse than those experienced on board a
pirate ship: "Conditions for ordinary seamen were both harsh and dangerous - and
the pay was poor. Punishments available to the ship's officers included
manacling, flogging and keel-hauling - the victim being pulled by means of a
rope under the hull of the ship from one side to the other. Keel-hauling was a
punishment which often proved fatal."(3) As Dr. Johnson famously observed: "no
man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for
being in a ship is being in jail with the chance of being drowned... A man in
jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company."(4)

In opposition to this, pirates created a world of their own making, where
they had "the choice in themselves" - a world of solidarity and fraternity,
where they shared the risks and the gains of life at sea, made decisions
collectively and seized their life for themselves in the present, denying its
use to the merchants as a tool for the accumulation of dead property. Indeed,
Lord Vaughan, Governor of Jamaica, wrote: "These Indyes are so Vast and Rich,
And this kind of rapine so sweet, that it is one of the hardest things in the
World to draw those from it which have used it for so long."(5)

The Rise of Piracy

The era of Euro-American piracy is ushered in by the
discovery of the New World and the enormous empire seized by the Spanish in the
Americas. New technologies allowed long sea voyages to be made with regularity
and accuracy, and the new empires that emerged were not based so much on control
of the land as control of the seas. The Spanish were the world superpower of the
16th century, but did not go unchallenged for long; the French, Dutch and
English all struggled to overtake the Spanish in the scramble for empire. In
their quest to do so they were not above using piracy to attack the hated
Spanish and fill their coffers with the vast wealth the Spanish had plundered
from the Native Americans. In wartime this raiding would be legitimised as legal
privateering but the rest of the time it was simply piracy with
state-sponsorship (or at least toleration and encouragement). Over the course of
the 17th century these embryonic empires finally overtook the Spanish and
established themselves. With the new technologies shipping was no longer just
used for luxury goods but became the basis of an international trading network
essential to the origin and growth of capitalism. The massive expansion of
sea-borne trade in this period necessarily also created a large population of
seafarers - a new class of wage-workers that had not previously existed. For
many of them piracy seemed an attractive alternative to the harsh realities of
the merchant service or the navy.

But as the new empires - especially the British Empire - matured, attitudes
to piracy changed: "The roistering buccaneer did not suit the hard-headed
merchants and imperial bureaucrats, whose musty world of balance sheets and
reports came into violent conflict with that of the pirates." The ruling class
recognised that stable, orderly, regular trade served the interests of a mature
imperial power far better than piracy. So piracy was forced to evolve in the
late 17th and early 18th century. Pirates were no longer state-sponsored
gentleman-adventurers like Sir Francis Drake but dropout wage slaves, mutineers,
a multi-ethnic melting pot of rebellious proles. Where there had once been a
blurring of the edges between legitimate commercial activity and piracy, now
pirates found they had few of their old friends left and were increasingly
regarded as "Brutes, and Beasts of Prey." As mainstream society rejected the
pirates, they likewise became increasingly antagonistic in their rejection of
it. From this point onwards the only pirates were those who explicitly rejected
the state and its laws and declared themselves in open war against it. Pirates
were driven further away from the centres of power as the American colonies,
originally beyond state control and relatively autonomous, were brought into the
mainstream of imperial trade and governance. There developed a deadly spiral of
increasing violence as state attacks were met with revenge from the pirates
leading to greater state terror.(6)

[IMAGE]

"a dunghill wheron England doth cast forth its rubbish"

The Caribbean islands in the second half of the 17th
century were a melting pot of rebellious and pauperised immigrants from across
the world. There were thousands of deported Irish, Liverpool beggars, Royalist
prisoners from Scotland, pirates caught on the English high seas, highwaymen
caught on the Scottish borders, exiled Huguenots and Frenchmen, outlawed
religious dissenters and the captured prisoners of various uprisings and plots
against the King.

The proto-anarchist revolutionary movements of the Civil War of the 1640s had
been suppressed and defeated by the time of the dawn of the great age of piracy
in the late 17th century but there is good evidence to show that some of the
Diggers, Ranters, Muggletonians, Fifth Monarchy Men etc. fled to the Americas
and the Caribbean where they inspired or joined these insurrectionary pirate
crews. Indeed, a group of pirates settled in Madagascar at a place they had
"given the name of Ranter Bay."(7) After the defeat of the Levellers in 1649,
John Lilburne offered to lead his followers to the West Indies, if the
government would foot the bill. It also seems that the Ranters and Diggers
lasted longer in the Americas than in Britain - as late as the 1690s there were
reported to be Ranters in Long Island. This isn't surprising really as the New
World territories were used by Britain as penal colonies for its discontented
and rebellious poor. In 1655 Barbados was described as "a dunghill wheron
England doth cast forth its rubbish." Among these undesirables there would have
been numbers of radicals - those who had provided the spark for the revolution
of 1640. "Perrot, the bearded ranter who refused to doff his hat to the
Almighty, ended up in Barbadoes," as did many others such as the Ranter
intellectual Joseph Salmon. That the Caribbean had become a haven for radicals
did not go unnoticed: in 1656 Samuel Highland advised Parliament not to sentence
the Quaker heretic James Nayler to transportation lest he infect other settlers.
It was clear at this time that the new British colonies to the west were seen as
a haven of relative religious and political liberty; that much further beyond
the grasp of law and authority.(8)

Before European merchants discovered the African slave trade and the
commercial possibilities of shipping Africans to the Caribbean, thousands of
poor and working class Europeans were shipped to the new colonies as indentured
servants - effectively a slave trade of its own. The only difference between the
trade in indentured servants and the African slave trade was that in theory the
slavery of these immigrants was not considered eternal and hereditary. However,
many were tricked and their contracts extended indefinitely so they never won
their freedom. Slaves, a lifetime investment, were often treated better than the
indentured servants.(9)

However, the masters had great difficulty holding on to their servants who
tended to go native and abscond to the freedom of the myriad islands of the
Antilles, or to isolated bits of coastline or jungle. Here they often formed
little self-governing bands or tribes of dropouts and runaways, in many ways
mimicking the native peoples before them. These men - sailors and soldiers,
slaves and indentured servants, formed the basis for the Caribbean piracy that
emerged in the 17th century - maintaining their egalitarian tribal structure
even when at sea. As their numbers grew and more men flocked to the red flag,
their attacks on the Spanish became more audacious. After a raid they would make
for a city like Port Royale in Jamaica, to spend all their money in one great
binge of whoring, gambling and drinking before returning to their
hunter-gatherer existence on out of the way islands.(10)

There were also of course up to 80,000 black slaves working on the
plantations who were prone to frequent and bloody revolts, as well as the last
few remaining indigenous Indian inhabitants of the islands. In 1649 a slave
rebellion on Barbados coincided with a white servants' uprising. In 1655,
following a common pattern, the Irish joined with the blacks in revolt. There
were similar rebellions in Bermuda, St. Christopher and Montserrat, whilst in
Jamaica transported Monmouthite rebels united with 'maroon' Indians in revolt.
This hodge-podge of the dispossessed were described in 1665 as "convict gaol
birds or riotous persons, rotten before they are sent forth, and at best idle
and only fit for the mines." To which a lady colonist of Antigua added "they be
all a company of sodomists." This was the seething multi-racial hotbed of anger
and class tension into which our transported or voluntarily exiled Ranters,
Diggers and Levellers would have arrived and out of which the great age of
Euro-American piracy took shape with the emergence of the buccaneers in the
Caribbean around the middle of the 17th century.(11)

Arrgh, Jim Lad!

The overwhelming majority of pirates were merchant
seamen who elected to join the pirates when their ships were captured, although
a small number were mutineers who had collectively seized their ship. "According
to Patrick Pringle's Jolly Roger, pirate recruitment was most successful among
the unemployed, escaped bondsmen, and transported criminals. The high seas made
for an instantaneous levelling of class inequalities."

Many pirates displayed a fine sense of class consciousness; for example, a
pirate named Captain Bellamy made this speech to the captain of a merchant
vessel he had just taken as a prize. The captain of the merchant vessel had just
declined an invitation to join the pirate crew:

"I am sorry they won't let you have your Sloop again, for I scorn to do any
one a Mischief, when it is not for my Advantage; damn the Sloop, we must sink
her, and she might be of Use to you. Tho', damn ye, you are a sneaking Puppy,
and so are all those who will submit to be governed by Laws which rich Men have
made for their own Security, for the cowardly Whelps have not the Courage
otherwise to defend what they get by their Knavery; but damn ye altogether: Damn
them for a Pack of crafty Rascals, and you, who serve them, for a Parcel of
hen-hearted Numskuls. They villify us, the Scoundrels do, when there is only
this Difference, they rob the Poor under the Cover of Law, forsooth, and we
plunder the Rich under the Protection of our own Courage; had you not better
make One of us, than sneak after the Arses of those Villains for Employment?"

When the captain replied that his conscience would not let him break the laws
of God and man, the pirate Bellamy continued:

"You are a devilish Conscience Rascal, damn ye, I am a free Prince, and I
have as much Authority to make War on the whole World, as he who has a hundred
Sail of Ships at Sea, and an Army of 100,000 Men in the Field; and this my
Conscience tells me; but there is no arguing with such sniveling Puppies, who
allow Superiors to kick them about Deck at Pleasure."(12)

Piracy was one strategy in an early cycle of Atlantic class struggle. Seamen
also used mutiny and desertion and other tactics in order to survive and to
resist their lot. Pirates were perhaps the most international and militant
section of the proto-proletariat constituted by 17th and 18th century sailors.
There were, for example, some hardcore trouble-makers like Edward Buckmaster, a
sailor who joined Kidd's crew in 1696, who had been arrested and jailed a number
of times for agitation and rioting, or Robert Culliford, who repeatedly led
mutinies, seizing the ship he was serving on and turning pirate.(13)

During wartime, due to the demands of the navy, there was a great shortage of
skilled maritime labour and seamen could command relatively high wages. The end
of war, especially Queen Anne's War, which ended in 1713, cast vast numbers of
naval seamen into unemployment and caused a huge slump in wages. 40,000 men
found themselves without work at the end of the war - roaming the streets of
ports like Bristol, Portsmouth and New York. In wartime privateering provided
the opportunity for a relative degree of freedom and a chance at wealth. The end
of war meant the end of privateering too, and these unemployed ex-privateers
only added to the huge labour surplus. Queen Anne's War had lasted 11 years and
in 1713 many sailors must have known little else but warfare and the plundering
of ships. It was commonly observed that on the cessation of war privateers
turned pirate. The combination of thousands of men trained and experienced in
the capture and plundering of ships suddenly finding themselves unemployed and
having to compete harder and harder for less and less wages was explosive - for
many piracy must have been one of the few alternatives to starvation.(14)

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity

Having escaped the tyranny of discipline aboard
merchant vessels the most striking thing about the organisation of pirate crews
was their anti-authoritarian nature. Each crew functioned under the terms of
written articles, agreed by the whole crew and signed by each member. The
articles of Bartholomew Roberts' crew begin:

"Every Man has a Vote in Affairs of Moment; has equal Title to the fresh
Provisions, or strong Liquors, at any Time seized, and may use them at Pleasure,
unless a Scarcity make it necessary, for the Good of all, to vote a
Retrenchment."(15)

Euro-American pirate crews really formed one community, with a common set of
customs shared across the various ships. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity
thrived at sea over a hundred years before the French Revolution. The
authorities were often shocked by their libertarian tendencies; the Dutch
Governor of Mauritius met a pirate crew and commented: "Every man had as much
say as the captain and each man carried his own weapons in his blanket." This
was profoundly threatening to the order of European society, where firearms were
restricted to the upper classes, and provided a stark contrast to merchant ships
where anything that could be used as a weapon was kept under lock and key, and
to the navy where the primary purpose of the marines stationed on naval vessels
was to keep the sailors in their place.(16)

Pirate ships operated on a 'No Prey, No Pay' basis, but when a vessel was
captured the booty was divided up by a share system. This sort of share system
was common in mediaeval shipping, but had been phased out as shipping became a
capitalist enterprise and sailors wage labourers. It still existed in
privateering and whaling but pirates developed it into its most egalitarian form
- there were no shares for owners or investors or merchants, there was no
elaborate hierarchy of wage differentiation - everyone got an equal share of the
booty and the captain usually only 1 or 1 1/2 share. The wreck of Sam Bellamy's
pirate ship the Whydah, which was discovered in 1984, provides good evidence of
this - among the artefacts recovered was rare West African gold Akan jewellery
which "had been hacked apart with clear knife marks, which suggested that there
had been an attempt to divide it equally."(17)

The harshness of life at sea made mutual aid into a simple survival tactic.
The natural solidarity of fellow tars was carried over into pirate organisation.
Pirates often went into 'consortship' with one another, where if one died the
other got his property. Pirate articles also commonly included a form of mutual
aid where injured shipmates unable to participate in the fighting would receive
their share as a pension. Pirates took this sort of solidarity very seriously -
at least one pirate crew compensated their wounded only to discover they had
nothing left. From the articles of Bartholomew Roberts' crew: "If... any Man
should lose a Limb, or become a Cripple in their Service, he was to have 800
Dollars, out of the publick Stock, and for lesser Hurts, proportionably." And
from those of George Lowther's crew: "He that shall have the Misfortune to lose
a Limb, in Time of Engagement, shall have the Sum of one hundred and fifty
Pounds Sterling, and remain with the Company as long as he shall think fit."(18)

Pirate captains were elected and could be de-elected at any time for abuse of
their authority. The captain enjoyed no special privileges: He "or any other
Officer is allowed no more [food] than another man, nay, the Captain cannot keep
his Cabbin to himself." Captains were deposed for cowardice, cruelty and
revealingly, for refusing "to take and plunder English Vessels" - the pirates
had turned their backs on the state and its laws and no lingering feelings of
patriotism were to be allowed. The captain only had right of command in the heat
of battle, otherwise all decisions were made by the whole ship's company. This
radical democracy was not necessarily very efficient; often pirate ships tended
to wander rather aimlessly as the crew changed its mind.(19)

The crew of Thomas Anstis ridicule the law by holding a mock trial. The judge, using an old tarpaulin as a robe and a mop-end as a wig, sits in a mangrove tree and declares: "I'll have you know, Raskal, we don't sit here to hear Reason - we go according to Law."

The original buccaneers had called themselves the 'brethren of the coast' -
an apt term as pirates swapped ships, met up at rendez-vous points, joined
together with other crews for combined raids and met up with old ship mates.
Although it might seem surprising that over the whole expanse of the world's
oceans the pirates kept in touch and met up with each other, they continually
returned to the various 'free ports' where they were welcomed by black market
traders who would buy their goods. Pirate crews recognised each other, didn't
attack each other and often worked together in large fleets. For example in 1695
the crews of Captains Avery, Faro, Want, Maze, Tew and Wake all met up for a
combined raid on the annual Muslim pilgrim fleet to Mecca, the six ships
containing at least 500 men. They also met up and had parties together; like the
"saturnalia" when the crews of Blackbeard and Charles Vane joined forces on
North Carolina's Ocracoke Island in 1718 (see picture on page 71). There is even
evidence that there was a unique pirate language, which is a real sign the
pirates were evolving their own distinct culture. Philip Ashton, who spent
sixteen months among pirates in 1722-3, reported that one of his captors
"according to the Pirates usual Custom, and in their proper Dialect, asked me,
If I would sign their Articles". There is also a hilarious account of how a
pirate captive "sav'd his life [by] meer Dint of Cursing and Damning" -
suggesting that one feature of this pirate language was the liberal use of
blasphemy and swearing. Through splitting and coalescing and men jumping from
ship to ship a great continuity existed amongst the various pirate crews,
sharing the same cultures and customs and over the course of time developing a
specifically 'pirate consciousness.' The prospect that this pirate community
might take a more permanent form was a threat to the authorities who feared that
they might set up "a Commonwealth" in uninhabited regions, where "no Power in
those Parts of the World could have been able to dispute it with them."(20)

[IMAGE] The crew of Thomas Anstis ridicule the law by holding a mock trial.
The judge, using an old tarpaulin as a robe and a mop-end as a wig, sits in a
mangrove tree and declares: "I'll have you know, Raskal, we don't sit here to
hear Reason - we go according to Law."

Revenge

One particularly important part of what we might call
the 'pirate consciousness' was revenge upon the captains and masters who had
previously exploited them. The pirate Howell Davis stated: "their reasons for
going a pirating were to revenge themselves on base Merchants and cruel
commanders of Ships." On capturing a merchantman pirates would commonly
administer the 'Distribution of Justice', "enquiring into the Manner of the
Commander's Behaviour to their Men, and those, against whom Complaint was made"
were "whipp'd and pickled." Interestingly, one of the favourite torments
inflicted upon captured captains was the 'Sweat' - a word meaning to drive hard
or to overwork - in which the offender was made to run round and round the
mizzenmast between decks to the tune of a merry jig while he was encouraged to
go faster by the surrounding pirates jabbing his backside with "Points of
Swords, Penknives, Compasses, Forks &c." It seems the pirates were
determined to give the master a taste of his own medicine - creating a literally
vicious circle or treadmill reminiscent of the seaman's labouring life. The most
militant of these sea-borne righters-of-wrong has to be Philip Lyne, who when
apprehended in 1726 confessed he "had killed 37 Masters of Vessels."(21)

'The Pirates Striking off the arm of Captain Babcock': Babcock's ship
was intercepted en route from Bombay, some of the crew joined the pirates and
turned against their own captain - apparently cutting his arm off.

Radical historian Marcus Rediker has uncovered interesting evidence of
pirates' concern with retribution in the names of their ships - the largest
single group of names are the ones involving revenge, for example Blackbeard's
ship the Queen Anne's Revenge or John Cole's wonderfully named New York
Revenge's Revenge. Merchant Captain Thomas Checkley got it just right when he
described the pirates who captured his ship as pretending "to be Robbin Hoods
Men." There is further evidence for this in the name of another ship - the
Little John belonging to pirate John Ward. Peter Lamborn Wilson says: "[this]
offers us a precious insight into his ideas and his image of himself: clearly he
considered himself a kind of Robin Hood of the seas. We have some evidence he
gave to the poor, and he was clearly determined to steal from the rich."(22)

The response of the state to these merry men of the seven seas was brutal -
the crime of piracy carried the death sentence. The early years of the 18th
century saw "royal officials and pirates [locked] into a system of reciprocal
terror" as pirates became more antagonistic to mainstream society and the
authorities ever more determined to hunt them down. Rumours that pirates who had
taken advantage of the 1698 royal pardon were on surrendering denied the
benefits of the pardon only increased mistrust and antagonism; the pirates
resolved "no longer to attend to any offers of forgiveness but in case of
attack, to defend themselves on their faithless countrymen who may fall into
their hands." In 1722 Captain Luke Knott was granted £230 for the loss of
his career, after turning over 8 pirates, "his being obliged to quit the
Merchant service, the Pirates threatening to Torture him to death if ever he
should fall into their hands." It was by no means an empty threat - in 1720
pirates of the crew of Bartholomew Roberts "openly and in the daytime burnt and
destroyed... vessels in the Road of Basseterre [St. Kitts] and had the
audaciousness to insult H.M. Fort," avenging the execution of "their comrades at
Nevis". Roberts then sent word to the governor that "they would Come and Burn
the Town [Sandy Point] about his Ears for hanging the Pyrates there." Roberts
even had his own pirate flag made showing him standing on two skulls labelled
ABH and AMH - 'A Barbadian's Head' and 'A Martinican's Head' - later that same
year he gave substance to his vendetta against the two islands by hanging the
governor of Martinique from a yardarm. As bounties were offered for the capture
of pirates, the pirates responded by offering rewards for certain officials. And
when pirates were captured or executed, other pirate crews often revenged their
brethren, attacking the town that condemned them, or the shipping of that port.
This sort of solidarity shows that there had developed a real pirate community,
and that those sailing under 'the banner of King Death' no longer thought of
themselves as English or Dutch or French but as pirates.(23)

Piracy and Slavery

The Golden Age of piracy was also the hey-day of the
Atlantic slave trade. The relationship between piracy and the slave trade is
complex and ambiguous. Some pirates participated in the slave trade and shared
their contemporaries' attitude to Africans as commodities for exchange.

A group of pirates, among them Gibbs and Wansley, burying their
treasure on Barron Island. This engraving is unusual for the rare depiction of
an African-American pirate, although in fact there were many of them.

However, not all pirates participated in the slave trade. Indeed large
numbers of pirates were ex-slaves; there was a much higher proportion of blacks
on pirate ships than on merchant or naval vessels, and only rarely did the
observers who noted their presence refer to them as 'slaves'. Most of these
black pirates would have been runaway slaves, either joining with the pirates on
the course of the voyage from Africa, deserting from the plantation, or sent as
slaves to work on board ship. Some may have been free men, like the "free Negro"
seaman from Deptford who in 1721 led "a Mutiney that we had too many Officers,
and that the work was too hard, and what not." Seafaring in general offered more
autonomy to blacks than life on the plantation, but piracy in particular, could
- although it was a risk - offer one of the few chances at freedom for an
African in the 18th century Atlantic. For example, a quarter of the two-hundred
strong crew of Captain Bellamy's ship the Whydah were black, and eyewitness
accounts of the sinking of the pirate vessel off Wellfleet, Massachusetts in
1717 report that many of the corpses washed up were black. Pirate historian
Kenneth Kinkor argues that although the Whydah was originally a slave ship, the
blacks on board at the time of the sinking were members of the crew, not slaves.
Partially because pirates, along with other tars, "entertain'd so contemptible a
Notion of Landsmen," a black man who knew the ropes was more likely to win
respect than a landsman who didn't. Kinkor notes: "Pirates judged Africans more
on the basis of their language and sailing skills - in other words, on their
level of cultural attainment - than on their race."(24)

Black pirates would often lead the boarding party to capture a prize. The
pirate ship the Morning Star had "a Negro Cook doubly arm'd" in the boarding
party and more than half of Edward Condent's boarding party on the Dragon were
black. Some black pirates became quartermasters or captains. For example, in
1699, when Captain Kidd dropped anchor in New York, two sloops were there to
meet him, one of whose "Mate was a little black man... who, as it was said, had
been formerly Captain Kidd's Quarter Master."(25)

In the 17th century blacks found on pirate ships were not tried with the
other pirates because it was assumed they were slaves, but by the 18th century
they were being executed alongside their white 'brethren'. Still the most likely
fate for a black pirate, if he was captured, was to be sold into slavery,
whether he was a freeman or not. When Blackbeard was captured by the Royal Navy
in 1718, five of his eighteen man crew were black and according to the
Governor's Council of Virginia the five blacks were "equally concerned with the
rest of the Crew in the same Acts of Piracy." A "resolute Fellow, a Negroe"
named Caesar was caught just as he was about to blow up the whole ship rather
than be captured and most likely returned to slavery.(26)

In 1715 the ruling Council of the Colony of Virginia worried about the
connections between the "Ravage of Pyrates" and "an Insurrection of the
Negroes." They were right to be concerned. By 1716 the slaves of Antigua had
grown "very impudent and insulting" and reportedly many of them "went off to
join those pirates who did not seem too concerned about color differences."
These connections were trans-Atlantic; stretching from the heart of Empire in
London, to the slave colonies in the Americas and the 'Slave Coast' of Africa.
In the early 1720s a gang of pirates settled in West Africa, joining and
intermixing with the Kru - a West African people from what is now Sierra Leone
and Liberia, renowned both for their seamanship in their long canoes and when
enslaved for their leadership of slave revolts. The pirates were probably
members of Bartholomew Roberts' crew who had fled into the woods when attacked
by the Navy in 1722. This alliance is not so unusual when you consider that of
the 157 men who didn't escape and were either captured or killed on board
Roberts' ship, 45 of them were black - probably neither slaves nor pirates but
"Black saylors, commonly known by the name of gremetoes" - independent African
mariners primarily from the Sierra Leone region, who would have joined the
pirates "for a small demand of wages."(27)

We can see the way these connections were spread and the how the pirates'
legacy was disseminated even after their defeat in the fate of some of those
captured on Roberts' pirate ship. "Negroes" from his crew grew mutinous over the
poor conditions and "thin Commons" they received from the Navy. "Many of them"
had "lived a long time" in the "pyratical Way", which obviously for them had
meant better food and more freedom.(28)

Going Native

Lionel Wafer was a French surgeon who joined the
buccaneer crews in the Caribbean in 1677. While returning from a voyage to the
East Indies he met with an accident and was forced to recuperate in an Indian
village, eventually adopting Indian customs. This is his description of the
return of some English sailors to the village:

"I sat awhile, cringing upon my hams among the Indians, after their fashion,
painted as they were, and all naked but only about the waist, and with my
nose-piece hanging over my mouth. 'Twas the better part of an hour before one of
the crew, looking more narrowly upon me, cried out, "Here's our doctor," and
immediately all congratulated my arrival among them."(29)

This sort of dropping out and going native was not always accidental. The
buccaneers of the Caribbean originally got their name from boucan, a practice of
smoking meat they had learnt from the native Arawak Indians. The buccaneers were
originally land squatters on the large Spanish owned island of Hispaniola (now
Haiti and the Dominican Republic) - they turned to piracy following Spanish
attempts to oust them. On Hispaniola they followed a way of life essentially
identical to the native peoples who had preceded them. This sort of 'marooning
life' was very clearly identified with piracy - apart from the buccaneers of
Hispaniola and Tortuga the main other group of European dropouts in the New
World were the logwood cutters of Bay of Campeche (now Honduras and Belize), a
"rude drunken crew" who were considered by most observers to be interchangeable
with pirates. They consciously chose a non-accumulative life living in
independent communal settlements on the world's periphery.(30)

The pirates' relations with the native peoples they encountered were split.
Some pirates would enslave peoples they encountered, make them work, rape the
women and steal. But other pirates settled down and intermarried - becoming part
of the society. Particularly in Madagascar, the pirates mixing with the native
population had produced "a dark Mulatto Race there." Contacts and cultural
exchange between pirates, seamen and Africans led to the clear similarities
between sea shanties and African songs. In 1743 some seamen were
court-martialled for singing a "negro song". These sort of connections went in
both directions and were not as rare as you might imagine. A pirate called
William May, stranded on the Madagascan island of Johanna got a shock when he
was addressed in fluent English by one of the "negroes". He learned that the man
had been taken from the island by an English ship and had lived for a while in
Bethnal Green in London, before returning home. His new friend saved him from
being captured by the English and taken to Bombay and hanged.(31)

It is a common feature of what you might call 'pirate ideology' that pirates
thought of themselves as free kings, as autonomous individual emperors. This was
partly to do with the dream of wealth - Henry Avery was idolised for the
enormous wealth he plundered; some believed he had set up his own pirate
kingdom. Yet there was a pirate who achieved an even more remarkable
rags-to-riches story, for he started out as a slave in the French colony of
Martinique: Abraham Samuel, "Tolinor Rex", the King of Fort Dauphin. Samuel was
a runaway slave who joined the crew of the pirate ship John and Rebecca,
eventually becoming quartermaster. In 1696 the pirates captured a large and
valuable prize and decided to retire and settle down in Madagascar. Samuel ended
up in the abandoned French colony of Fort Dauphin where he was identified by a
local princess as the child she had borne to a Frenchman during the occupancy of
the colony. Samuel suddenly found himself declared heir to the vacant throne of
the kingdom. Slavers and merchants flocked to do business with "King Samuel" but
he retained sympathies for his pirate comrades, allowing and assisting them to
loot the merchants who came to trade with him. There were a number of similar,
if less flamboyant, characters in the ports and harbours of Madagascar - pirates
or slavers who had become local leaders with private armies of as many as 500
men.(32)

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Sex and Drugs and Rock n' Roll

The pirates certainly seem to have had more fun than
their poor suffering counterparts on naval or merchant vessels. They sure had
some pretty wild parties - in 1669 just off the coast of Hispaniola, some of
Henry Morgan's buccaneers blew up their own ship during a particularly riotous
party, which like all good pirate celebrations included much drunken firing of
the ship's guns. Somehow they set light to the gunpowder in the ship's magazine
and the resulting explosion totally destroyed the ship. On some voyages alcohol
ran "as freely as ditchwater" and for many tars the promise of unrestricted grog
rations had been one of the main reasons behind leaving the merchant service to
become a pirate in the first place. However this sometimes backfired - one group
of pirates took three days to capture a ship because there were never enough
sober men available. Sailors in general loathed a "drink-water" voyage - one
reason being that in the tropics the water tended to get things living in it and
you had to strain it through your teeth.(33)

No pirate celebration would be complete without music. Pirates were renowned
for their love of music and often hired musicians for the duration of a cruise.
During the trial of "Black Bart" Bartholomew Roberts' crew in 1722, two men were
acquitted as being only musicians. The pirates seem to have employed music in
battle, as it was said of one of the men, James White, that his "business as
music was upon the poop in time of action."(34)

For some men the freedom that piracy offered from the constrained world they
had left behind extended to sexuality. European society of the 17th and 18th
centuries was savagely anti-homosexual. The Royal Navy periodically conducted
brutal anti-buggery campaigns on ships on which men might be confined together
for years. In both the navy and the merchant service it was considered that
sexuality was inimical to work and good order on board ship, as Minister John
Flavel wrote of seamen to merchant John Lovering: "The Death of their Lusts, is
the most Probable Means to give Life to your Trade." B.R. Burg in Sodomy and the
Pirate Tradition suggests that the vast majority of pirates were homosexual, and
although there isn't really enough evidence to support this, nevertheless to
indulge in these things a pirate colony was probably just about the safest place
you could be. Some of the early buccaneers of Hispaniola and Tortuga lived in a
kind of homosexual union known as matelotage (from the French for 'sailor' and
possibly the origin of the word 'mate' meaning companion), holding their
possessions in common, with the survivor inheriting. Even after women joined the
buccaneers, matelotage continued with a partner sharing his wife with his
matelot. Louis Le Golif in his Memoirs of a Buccaneer complained about
homosexuality on Tortuga, where he had to fight two duels to keep ardent suitors
at bay. Eventually the French Governor of Tortuga imported hundreds of
prostitutes, hoping thereby to wean the buccaneers away from this practice. The
pirate captain Robert Culliford, had a "great consort," John Swann, who lived
with him. Some men bought "pretty boys" as companions. On one pirate ship a
young man who admitted a homosexual relationship was put in irons and
maltreated, but this seems to have been the exception rather than the rule. It
is also significant that in no pirate articles are there any rules against
homosexuality.(35)

Pirate Women

The freedom of life under the Jolly Roger extended to
another perhaps surprising group of sea-robbers: women pirates. Women weren't
quite as rare at sea in the 17th and 18th centuries as you might imagine them to
have been. There was a fairly well established tradition of women cross-dressing
in order to seek their fortune, or to follow husbands or lovers to sea. Of
course the only women we know about are the ones that got caught and exposed.
Their more successful sisters have sailed off into anonymity. Even so, it would
seem that women aboard pirate ships were few. Ironically this may have
contributed to the pirates' downfall - they were relatively easy for the state
to crush because the pirate community was widely dispersed and inherently
fragile; they found it hard to reproduce or replenish their numbers. By
comparison, the much longer lived and more successful pirates of the South China
Seas were organised in family groups with men, women and children all at sea
together - thus there was always a new generation of pirates to hand.(36)

Just as pirates in general defined themselves in opposition to the emerging
capitalist social relations of the 17th and 18th centuries, so also some women
found in piracy a way to rebel against the emerging gender roles. For example,
Charlotte de Berry, born in England in 1636, followed her husband into the navy
by dressing as a man. When she was forced aboard an Africa-bound vessel, she led
a mutiny against the captain who had assaulted her, cutting off his head with a
dagger. She then turned pirate and became captain, her ship cruising the African
coast capturing gold ships. There were also other less successful women pirates;
in Virginia in 1726, the authorities tried Mary Harley (or Harvey) and three men
for piracy. The three men were sentenced to hang but Harley was released. Mary's
husband Thomas was also involved in the piracy but seems to have escaped
capture. Mary and her husband had been transported to the colonies as convicts a
year earlier. Three years later in 1729, another deported female convict was on
trial for piracy in the colony of Virginia. A gang of six pirates were sentenced
to hang, including Mary Crickett (or Crichett), who along with Edmund Williams,
the leader of the pirate gang, had been transported to Virginia as a felon in
1728.(37)

However, the women pirates about whom we know the most are Anne Bonny and
Mary Read. Mary Read was born as an illegitimate child, and brought up as a
little boy by her mother in order to pass her off to her relatives as her
legitimate son. She had to be tough to deal with the harsh circumstances of her
life and by the time she was a teenager she was already "growing bold and
strong." Mary seems to have liked her male identity and enlisted herself as a
sailor on a man-of-war and then as an English soldier in the war in Flanders. At
the end of the war she joined a Dutch ship bound for the West Indies. When her
ship was captured by 'Calico' Jack Rackham's pirate crew, which included Anne
Bonny, she decided to throw her lot in with the pirates. She seems to have taken
to pirate life and began a new romance with one of the crew. When her lover got
into an argument with a fellow pirate and was challenged to settle it in the
pirate's customary way "at sword and pistol", Mary saved her lover by picking a
fight with the contender, challenging him to a duel two hours before that he was
due to fight with her lover and then running him through with her cutlass.(38)

Anne Bonny was born the illegitimate child of a "Maid-Servant" in Ireland and
raised in male disguise, her father pretending she was the child of a relative
entrusted to his care. He eventually took her to Charleston, South Carolina,
where they no longer needed to keep up the pretence. Anne grew up into a
"robust" woman of "fierce and couragious temper." Indeed, one time "when a young
Fellow would have lain with her against her Will, she beat him so, that he lay
ill of it a considerable time." She ran away to the Caribbean where she fell in
love with the captain of a pirate crew called 'Calico' Jack Rackham (so-called
because of his outlandish and colourful clothing). Anne and 'Calico' Jack,
"finding they could not by fair means enjoy each other's Company with Freedom,
resolved to run away together, and enjoy it in Spight of all the World." They
stole a ship from the harbour and for the next couple of years Bonny was
Rackham's shipmate and lover as their crew (which soon also included Mary Read
disguised in male clothing, who joined them from a ship they captured) raided
shipping in the Caribbean and American coastal waters.(39)

One of the witnesses at their trial, a woman called Dorothy Thomas, who had
been taken prisoner by the pirates, said the women "wore Mens Jackets, and long
Trousers, and Handkerchiefs tied about their Heads, and that each of them had a
Machet[e] and Pistol in their Hands." Despite the fact Read and Bonny were in
men's clothing, their prisoner was no fool; she said that "the Reason of her
knowing and believing them to be Women was, by the largeness of their Breasts."

Other prisoners taken by the pirates reported that Bonny and Read "were both
very profligate, cursing, and swearing much, and very ready and willing to do
any Thing on board." Both women appear to have exercised some leadership; for
example, they were part of the group designated to board prizes - which was a
role reserved for only the most fearless and respected members of the crew. When
the pirates "saw any vessel, gave Chase or Attack'd," the pair "wore Men's
Cloaths," but at other times, "they wore Women's Cloaths."(40)

Rackham, Bonny and Read were all caught in 1720 by a British navy sloop off
Jamaica. The crew were all totally drunk (a common event) and hid in the hold -
there was only one other apart from Bonny and Read who was brave enough to
fight. In disgust, Mary Read fired a pistol down into the hold "killing one and
wounding others." Eighteen members of the crew had already been tried and
sentenced to hang by the time the women came to court. Three of them, including
Rackham, were later hung in chains at prime locations to act as a moral
instruction and "Publick Example" to the seamen who would pass their rotting
corpses. However, Mary Read insisted that "Men of Courage" - like herself - did
not fear death. Courage was a primary virtue amongst the pirates - it was only
courage that ensured their continued survival. 'Calico' Jack Rackham had been
promoted from quartermaster to captain when the then current captain, Charles
Vane, had been deposed by his crew for cowardice. So it was an ignominious end
for Rackham to be told by Anne Bonny before he was due to be hanged that "if he
had fought like a Man, he need not have been hang'd like a Dog." Both Bonny and
Read escaped execution because they "pleaded their Bellies, being Quick with
Child, and pray'd that Execution might be staid."(41)

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Misson and Libertalia

The most famous pirate utopia is that of Captain
Misson and his pirate crew, who founded their intentional community, their
lawless utopia of Libertalia in northern Mada-gascar in the Eighteenth
century.(42)

Misson was French, born in Provence, and it was while in Rome on leave from
the French warship Victoire that he lost his faith, disgusted by the decadence
of the Papal Court. In Rome he ran into Caraccioli - a "lewd Priest" who over
the course of long voyages with little to do but talk, gradually converted
Misson and a sizeable portion of the rest of the crew to his brand of atheistic
communism:

"...he fell upon Government, and shew'd, that every Man was born free, and
had as much Right to what would support him, as to the Air he respired... that
the vast Difference betwixt Man and Man, the one wallowing in Luxury, and the
other in the most pinching Necessity, was owing only to Avarice and Ambition on
the one Hand, and a pusilanimous Subjection on the other."

Embarking on a career of piracy, the 200 strong crew of the Victoire called
upon Misson to be their captain. They collectivised the wealth of the ship,
deciding "all should be in common." All decisions were to be put to "the Vote of
the whole Company." Thus they set out on their new "Life of Liberty." Off the
west coast of Africa they captured a Dutch slave ship. The slaves were freed and
brought aboard the Victoire, Misson declaring that "the Trading for those of our
own Species, cou'd never be agreeable to the Eyes of divine Justice: That no Man
had Power of Liberty of another" and that "he had not exempted his Neck from the
galling Yoak of Slavery, and asserted his own Liberty, to enslave others." At
every engagement they added to their numbers with new French, English and Dutch
recruits and freed African slaves.

While cruising round the coast of Madagascar, Misson found a perfect bay in
an area with fertile soil, fresh water and friendly natives. Here the pirates
built Libertalia, renouncing their titles of English, French, Dutch or African
and calling themselves Liberi. They created their own language, a polyglot
mixture of African languages, combined with French, English, Dutch, Portuguese
and native Madagascan. Shortly after the beginning of building work on the
colony of Libertalia, the Victoire ran into the pirate Thomas Tew, who decided
to accompany them back to Libertalia. Such a colony was no new idea to Tew; he
had lost his quartermaster and 23 of his crew when they had left to form a
settlement further up the Madagascan coast. The Liberi - "Enemies to Slavery,"
aimed to boost their numbers by capturing another slave ship. Off the coast of
Angola, Tew's crew took an English slave ship with 240 men, women and children
below decks. The African members of the pirate crew discovered many friends and
relatives among the enslaved and struck off their fetters and handcuffs,
regaling them with the glories of their new life of freedom.

The pirates settled down to become farmers, holding the land in common - "no
Hedge bounded any particular Man's Property." Prizes and money taken at sea were
"carry'd into the common Treasury, Money being of no Use where every Thing was
in common."

The Empire Strikes Back: The End of the Golden Age of Piracy

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The Golden Age of Euro-American piracy was roughly from 1650 to 1725 with its
peak in about 1720. There were very specific conditions and circumstances that
led to this hey-day on the high seas. The period opens with the emergence of the
buccaneers on the Caribbean islands of Hispaniola and Tortuga. For most of this
period piracy was centred around the Caribbean, and with good reason. The
Caribbean islands provided innumerable hiding places, secret coves and uncharted
islands; places where pirates could take on fresh water and provisions, rest up
and lie in wait. The location was perfect; lying just on the route taken by the
heavily laden treasure fleets from South America back to Spain and Portugal, the
Caribbean was effectively impossible for any navy to police and many islands
were unclaimed or uninhabited. All in all it added up to a freebooter's
paradise.

In 1700 a new law was introduced to allow for the swift trial and execution
of pirates wherever they may be found. Previously they had to be transported
back to London to stand trial and be executed at the low tide mark at Wapping.
The 'Act for the More Effectual Suppression of Piracy' also enforced the use of
the death penalty and gave rewards for resisting pirate attack, but most
importantly, it was not trial by jury but by a special court of naval officers.
The famous Captain Kidd was one of the first victims of this new law - indeed
the law was partially rushed through specifically so that it could be applied to
him. He was hanged at Execution Dock in Wapping and his body was then placed in
a gibbet, coated with tar to help preserve it, and hung at Tilbury Point to be a
"terror to all that saw it." The blackened and rotting corpse was intended to
serve as a very clear reminder to the common seaman of the risks of resisting
the disciplines of wage labour.(43)

Kidd's case was unusual in that he was executed in London. After 1700, under
the provisions of the new law the war against the pirates would increasingly
take place around the peripheries of Empire, and it wouldn't just be one or two
corpses that dangled from crosstrees down near the tidemark but sometimes twenty
or thirty at a time. In one particularly significant case in 1722 the British
Admiralty tried 169 pirates of Bartholomew Roberts' crew and executed 52 of them
at Cape Coast Castle on the Guinea Coast. The 72 Africans on board, free or not,
were sold into slavery, which perhaps some of them had escaped for a short
while.(44)

It was the disappearance of the unique favourable conditions of the Golden
Age that ended the reign of the pirates. With the development of capital in the
17th century came the rise of the state, fostered by the imperial wars that
wracked the globe from 1688 onwards. The requirements of conducting these vast
wars necessitated a huge increase in state power. When, in 1713, the Treaty of
Utrecht ended war between the European nations, the state's ability to actually
police piracy was massively increased. The end of the war also allowed naval
ships to concentrate on hunting down the pirates and granted the British even
larger commercial interests in the Caribbean, giving an extra incentive to these
efforts. As the new, more powerful state consolidated its monopoly on violence,
the colonies were brought into line. The practice of dealing with pirates and
investing in pirate voyages had continued in the colonies long after it had
become unacceptable at home; it was wiped out by an extension of state power
from the mother country to enforce discipline on the colonies. The beginning of
the end was marked by ex-buccaneer Sir Henry Morgan's return to Jamaica as
Governor with express orders to destroy the pirates. Naval patrols flushed them
from their lairs and mass hangings eliminated the leaders. Ultimately the
pirates' war on trade had become too successful to be tolerated; the state was
fighting to allow commerce to flow unimpeded and capital to accumulate, bringing
wealth to the merchants and revenue to the state.(45)

If we want to look for the heirs of the libertarian piracy of the Golden Age
we shouldn't necessarily only be looking at more recent pirates, but rather at
how piracy fed into the Atlantic class struggle. Just as some of the initial
impetus behind the piracy of the 17th and 18th centuries had come from
land-based radical movements like the Levellers, the flow of ideas and practices
circulated around the Atlantic world, emerging in sometimes surprising places.
In 1748 there was a mutiny aboard the HMS Chesterfield, near Cape Coast Castle
off the west coast of Africa. One of the ringleaders - John Place - had been
there before; he was one those captured with Bartholomew Roberts back in 1722.
It was "old hands" like John Place who kept alive the pirate tradition and
ensured the continuity of ideas and practices. The mutineers hoped
pirate-fashion "to settle a colony". The term 'to strike' originated in mutiny,
particularly the "Great Mutinies" at Spithead and the Nore in 1797 when sailors
would strike their sails to disrupt the ceaseless flow of trade and the state's
war machine. These English, Irish and African sailors established their own
"council" and "shipboard democracy" and some even talked of settling a "New
Colony" in America or Madagascar.(46)

The pirates prospered in a power vacuum, during a period of upheaval and war
that allowed them the freedom to live effectively outside the law. With the
coming of peace came an extension of control and an end to the possibility of
pirate autonomy. This is not so surprising really when we consider that periods
of war and turmoil have often allowed for revolutionary experiments, enclaves,
communes and anarchies to flourish. From the pirates of the 17th and 18th
centuries, to D'Annunzio's piratical Republic of Fiume in the First World War,
the Paris Commune in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, The Diggers' land
communes in the English Civil War and the Makhnovist peasants in the Ukraine
during the Russian Revolution, it is often in interstice and interregnum that
experiments in freedom can find space to flower.

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"Is this Utopian? A map of the world which does not include Utopia is not
worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is
always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a
better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias." - Oscar
Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism(47)

(BOX) The Black Flag

"Why is our flag black? Black is a shade of negation. The black flag is the
negation of all flags. It is a negation of nationhood which puts the human race
against itself and denies the unity of all humankind. Black is a mood of anger
and outrage at all the hideous crimes against humanity perpetrated in the name
of allegiance to one state or another."(48)

We all know that pirates flew the 'Jolly Roger' - the skull and cross-bones
flag. The most likely derivation of the name 'Jolly Roger' is as an
Anglicisation of the French Jolie Rouge - the red or 'bloody' flag that pirates
originally used before the more well-known black. The red flag is widely known
as the international symbol of proletarian revolution and revolt and the black
flag has historically been the flag of the anarchist movement. (These two
colours were most famously combined in the anarcho-communist red and black flags
of the Spanish revolution of 1936.) (49)

The earliest definite report of the black flag being flown by anarchists or
used in working class revolt is of the famous anarchist Louise Michel leading a
crowd of rioting unemployed to ransack bakers' shops with a black flag on March
9th 1883. However there are reports that she had flown a skull and cross-bones
flag 12 years earlier in 1871, while leading the women's battalions of the
insurrectionary Paris Commune. The Paris Commune even had a daily paper called
Le Pirate.(50)

In June 1780 when the prisons of London were broken open and the prisoners
freed during the Gordon Riots we find this description: "A giant of a man had
been seen riding a cart-horse and waving an immense black and red flag, like the
standard bearer of an opposing army." This man's name was James Jackson and he
led the masses to destroy London's main prison with a shout of "A-hoy for
Newgate!" It would not be reading too much into it to suggest that this "a-hoy!"
might indicate Jackson was a sailor - sailors had always been the most militant
section of the working class, in which case this black and red flag signalling a
call to freedom on the streets of London could easily have direct links to the
black and red flags of the Caribbean several years earlier. This thus
considerably pre-dates Louise Michel and almost puts us back in the hey-day of
the pirates.(51)

The red and black flew again in the Caribbean in 1791. After a huge slave
revolt, part of the old pirate stronghold of Hispaniola took instead the Native
American name "Haiti" and became the world's first independent black republic.
Led by Toussaint L'Ouverture, the rebels defeated the forces of three empires to
win their liberty. The red and black flag of Haiti became a banner of freedom to
eighteenth and nineteenth century blacks, especially to sailors who would sail
to Haiti, become Haitians and then return home flying a red and black flag.
American slaves aboard naval and merchant vessels would flee and seek refuge in
Haiti.(52)

Of a certain William Davidson, we are informed: "at a demonstration he
protected the black flag with skull and cross bones, 'Let us die like Men and
not be sold like Slaves,' the flag said." Davidson was a black man born in 1786
and executed in 1820. He was born in Kingston, Jamaica - erstwhile 'wickedest
city on the earth' and notorious pirate capital. He spent three years at sea,
was a trade unionist, read Tom Paine and may have had some connection to
Toussaint L'Ouverture and the revolution in Haiti. He was finally executed on
Mayday 1820 with others for being part of the 'Cato Street conspiracy' to
assassinate the entire cabinet while they were at dinner. This was intended to
lead to attacks on Mansion House and the Bank of England, the seizing of
artillery and to give the spark for a revolution in Britain!(53)

Be Proud to fly the Jolly Roger!

(BOX) Waging War on the Whalers

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Since 1977, modern-day, real-life pirates Sea Shepherd have roamed the
world's oceans attacking and sinking whaling vessels and driftnetters. The black
ship with a black pirate flag is equipped with spikes for ripping open the sides
of enemy vessels and bows reinforced with 18 tons of concrete for ramming them.
Flying their own version of the Jolly Roger - a skull above a crossed shepherd's
crook and trident - 'Neptune's Navy' have engaged in over 20 years of guerrilla
war for marine ecology: "Any whaling ship on the ocean is a target for Sea
Shepherd."

The whole of the following narrative is drawn from Captain Charles Johnson's
General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates,
published in London in 1728, (Op. Cit. 1, pp. 383-439). Because Johnson's book
is the only source for the history of Captain Misson, the story is almost
universally asserted to be fictional. However the overall credibility of
Johnson's book has been established - it would appear that this is the only
fictional episode in an otherwise reliable work of history. The General History
was published only a very few years after the events it recorded took place, and
yet no one at the time denounced the Misson story as fiction. The story of
Misson was believed. And it was believed because it was believable. There were
radical, libertarian pirates, and there were pirate settlements on Madagascar -
all the elements of the story fit with what we know of pirates. Perhaps the
Misson story is a fiction with a solid basis in fact; perhaps like the story of
Robin Hood it collects together a wide range of different experiences in one
narrative. In either case the story of Libertalia represents the literary
expression of the living traditions, practices and dreams of the Atlantic
proletariat. On the Misson story and the reliability of the General History see:
Maximillian E. Novak - 'Introduction' to Daniel Defoe (Captain Charles Johnson)
- 'Of Captain Misson' (1728) extract from the General History - Augustan Reprint
Society, Publication number 87 (W. A. Clark Memorial Library, University of
California, Los Angeles, 1961), pp. i-iii; Op. Cit. 3, pp. 6-8; Op. Cit. 7, pp.
125-7, 249 n2, n7; Manuel Schonhorn - 'Introduction' to Op. Cit. 1, pp.
xxxvii-xxxviii; Rediker - 'Liberty beneath the Jolly Roger', pp. 230-1 n4, n11;
Botting - The Pirates, pp. 6, 21-22; Cordingly - Life Among the Pirates, pp.
10-11, 77

Cordingly - Life Among the Pirates, pp. 2, 138-143: "Red or 'bloody' flags
are mentioned as often as black flags until the middle of the eighteenth
century"; Op. Cit. 2, p. 22; Platt and Chambers - Pirate, p. 35

For more on this check out two excellent pieces by Peter Linebaugh - '
Jubilating: Or, How The Atlantic Working Class Used the Biblical Jubilee Against
Capitalism, With Some Success' in 'The New Enclosures': Midnight Notes #10
(1990), p. 92; and 'All the Atlantic Mountains Shook', in Eley and Hunt (eds.) -
Reviving the English Revolution: Reflections and Elaborations on the work of
Christopher Hill (London, Verso, 1988), p. 214. All you Sussex bioregionalists
out there will be thrilled to discover a Brighton connection to this notorious
conspiracy - one of the three executed was a Brighton butcher called James Ings
(perhaps recruited for his skill with a carving knife?), who said: "I will cut
every head off that is in the room and Lord Castlereagh's head and Lord
Sidmouth's I will bring away in a bag. For this purpose I will provide two
bags." See Rocky Hill - Underdog Brighton: A Rather Different History of the
Town (Brighton, Iconoclast Press, 1991), pp. 23-4, and John Stanhope - The Cato
Street Conspiracy (London, Johnathan Cape, 1962), p. 87